>>Clinton signed the Communications Decency act, the DMCA, and several others. Who would have thought a democrat would restrict freedom like that?
This is my favorite thing about politics in this country... If you speak out against anything that the Republicans do, you're automatically a Democrat, and vice-versa.
This is depsite the enormous number of citizens that thought they were both total schmucks...
The main reason software sucks is that software companies aren't meant to put out good software, they're meant to make money.
This whole "tech slump" is due to the demise of many good ideas (and many bad ones as well) that never came to fruition due to VC time constraints.
The people that are funding the companies care about ONE thing : return on investment. They expect it within 6 months, and set the Milestone dates accordingly. Developers aren't pushed to write good, usable, stable software, they're pushed to nail milestones.
Features get cut, QA doesn't get done, documentation is scarce, errors pop up, all because companies are pushing just to get something out there, not to finish a quality product.
The article mentioned above is useless without business models that will implement it.
My boss is constantly trying to "teach me responsibility," which means "you are responsible for being here 7 days a week, 12 hours a day."
What he doesn't understand is that it is his responsibility to make sure that I don't have to be here that much. It's his responsibility to make sure that we have reasonable goals and reasonable deadlines.
In most VC deals these days, developers are not present. The business people don't trust them, because they are "those people that are getting behind again." Developers are often unshaven and occasionally they display personality. These are not good things to VCs, they want nothing but money back ASAP. They don't want to mess around with vagaries, it's all about money.
Realistic investment should be the main goal, not instant ROI.
The only purpose of Open-Source is not having, well, open source. It's also about code sharing. It is communistic and down-right lame to expect everyone to follow the same license. Not everyone wants to make open-source software.
Then write your own code, don't borrow others'. Seems simple enough. If you don't believe in the GPL, don't use code that goes by it.
...you're playing Quake, and your roommate turns on the TV...
It's all well and good to say that you won't notice latency in your TV signal because it's coming in on a controlled network, but do you want your TV eating up your bandwidth?
Seriously... There are a lot of small development companies out there, especially those building ASP/Netapps, who don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to lay out on Sparc boxes for their QA and development work.
I wonder what these are going to do to the countless leasing companies that are reaming small shops for a good $14-16k (low-end) Ultra2 boxes...
I finally read it for the first time last year after meaning to for a long time, and I can kind of agree with you on the quality of it, but if I'd read it at like 14 or 15 I think I'd be one of the rabid fans as well.
I think it's a worthwhile skill to still be able to read like a child. I'm just now (at 29) reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time, and it's far more enjoyable (although of course not necessary, I'm not comparing OSC and JRRT) if I read it from my 12-year-old mindset. I would have missed a lot of what I'm picking up now, so I'm not implying that it's a children's book either, but there's just something about a youthful imagination that enhances the experience of SF/Fantasy.
That said, I did enjoy Ender's Game, mainly because I read it from that point of view. It's a bit like reading SE Hinton as an adult -- it's still a good story, but the writing isn't as mature as an adult would hope for.
Well, the problems aren't even just "all at once," since that implies that they are brief.
Around Chernobyl, things are still so far out of whack that they may not recover. We still don't know what the overall effects will be, and new things are still popping up with regularity.
. In our zeal to keep America free of radioactivity,
really, damn frivolous people, wanting to avoid radiation... and toxic waste...
your look at this is way oversimplified -- your only mention of safety issues is during construction, it doesn't take into account any sort of accidents, any sort of long-term effects on the surrounding area, or the people that live in it.
there is far more at stake here than financial issues.
...I currently hold the patent on using text and images in a series of panels to amuse the viewer on the web.
I will be expecting royalty checks to start pouring in. Gabe, Iliad, I'd like to point out that if I do not find a particular comic amusing, I have reserved the right to pull it.
Hint: I find the word "flan" infinitely amusing. Please plan accordingly.
uh, I use usenet on a daily basis, and have for 6 years now. it's not dead. there are just as many tight, solid communities out there now as there ever were, if not more.
i just don't get the whole "usenet is dead" argument.
I don't believe Apple will keep everything "under the hood". I do believe they will have a graphical front end for pratically everything, but if you want to pop into a command line and configure things with preciseness, I doubt that will be removed.
I get claustrophobic on Macs. It's my main issue with them: "How do I get at my config files?" "Wait, there's no SHELL? NO SHELL?"
Just the thought of having a nice looking box with a sweet, polished, stable GUI (in which I can actually *gasp* copy and paste between different apps and still be able to drop to a bash shell....
This is the bane of Apple right now. They've got comparable processors (speed-wise), but the MHz numbers don't look good at all. Motorola needs to trade instructions per clock cylce for higher MHz ratings to make them sound better (faster) to the lay-public.
I think Apple was doing a good job of this at first, but they seem to have stopped pushing the speed issue.
All they really need to do is get a coupl eof sentences into each ad that mentions the actual speed improvements, and make a mocking shot at the clock-speed race (there's nothing that Apple customers like more than mocking jabs at PC machines/people), and their job would be done.
Again, they're really just looking at problems with marketing issues... Nothing new to Apple.
As a final note, I think it's pretty sad that you do not wish to think about your home computer. To expect everything to work and not know what your computer does and why it does it is just ignorance, and no one should desire that.
Like the original poster, I work in a unix environment most of the time, and I work in w2k the rest of the time. Lately I've been working 6 days a week, 12-14 hour days.
At this point, my machine at home is used for nothing but occasional surfing and email. It's an appliance, a communications device.
I shouldn't have to think about it. Once I've installed the OS and added DNS, and IP address and a gateway, I shouldn't have to think any further.
Most of the population isn't interested in hacking. Maybe on IRC and on/. they are, but outside, the people you meet in the Big Blue Room don't want to have to think about it.
I'm looking for a simple appliance to put into the kitchen which will handle email and looking up recipes and occasionally checking web pages. I'd like to plug it in, just like the toaster, to an electrical outlet, then plug in the ethernet cable, maybe set the IP settings, and be done. Plain and simple.
It seems that in the name of stopping copyright infringement in the way of piracy, we have lost our right to make archival copies of whatever media we purchase.
This right never seems to be mentioned in the debates that I've seen, and yet it is something that is extremely important to the individual, especially when you are looking at software packages beomcing more and more expensive every year. If we've paid several thousand dollars for an Enterprise package like, say, Visual InterDev, having an archival copy of it is extremely important.
It doesn't appear as though the schemes for hard drive copy protection have any such concerns, much like all of the current pushes to reform copyright law.
We're living in an age when individual rights are being thrown over left and right in the name of profit margins, and it's projects like this that are eroding them.
I apologize, but I guess to each of us it sounds like the other is spewing a party line. I also say this because noone has yet even considered the fact that this entirely untested crop isn't being used to improve the health of the countries it has been dicovered in, it's being tested on third-world nations.
Malnutrition is a problem in most countries. Beta Karotene would be good in the diets of most of us, yet for some reason we're not seeing it on the shelves.
Like my earlier ignored analogy to drug testing in poor urban areas, this point bothers me. Apparently it doesn't bother you. I'm stil allowed to voice this opinion.
I'm not especially happy with the radiating of beef or other seeds either.
my email address is there, I just don't make it an easy link for crawlers.
I took ritalin for the last 4 years of my 9 year stint at college.
It was the only way I was going to pay attention long enough to the drivel that I was forced to sit through -- yes, some of it was fun, but for the most part it was just painful. I have trouble respecting and therefore paying attention to things that try to make me conform.
At any rate, I've since graduated and have been free of all stimulants (even caffeine) for quite some time now, with no problems whatsoever.
It was a necessary evil to get me a degree. Which, when all is said and done, I am honestly glad I got. But I don't need it anymore, and am much happier without it.
Slashdot Mirror
or maybe he's just as sick of the ludicrous bashing of this type, and posted the story so that people would stop bugging him about it.
actually, no maybe involved, he's clearly stated that.
>>Clinton signed the Communications Decency act, the DMCA, and several others. Who would have thought a democrat would restrict freedom like that?
This is my favorite thing about politics in this country... If you speak out against anything that the Republicans do, you're automatically a Democrat, and vice-versa.
This is depsite the enormous number of citizens that thought they were both total schmucks...
The main reason software sucks is that software companies aren't meant to put out good software, they're meant to make money.
This whole "tech slump" is due to the demise of many good ideas (and many bad ones as well) that never came to fruition due to VC time constraints.
The people that are funding the companies care about ONE thing : return on investment. They expect it within 6 months, and set the Milestone dates accordingly. Developers aren't pushed to write good, usable, stable software, they're pushed to nail milestones.
Features get cut, QA doesn't get done, documentation is scarce, errors pop up, all because companies are pushing just to get something out there, not to finish a quality product.
The article mentioned above is useless without business models that will implement it.
My boss is constantly trying to "teach me responsibility," which means "you are responsible for being here 7 days a week, 12 hours a day."
What he doesn't understand is that it is his responsibility to make sure that I don't have to be here that much. It's his responsibility to make sure that we have reasonable goals and reasonable deadlines.
In most VC deals these days, developers are not present. The business people don't trust them, because they are "those people that are getting behind again." Developers are often unshaven and occasionally they display personality. These are not good things to VCs, they want nothing but money back ASAP. They don't want to mess around with vagaries, it's all about money.
Realistic investment should be the main goal, not instant ROI.
The only purpose of Open-Source is not having, well, open source. It's also about code sharing. It is communistic and down-right lame to expect everyone to follow the same license. Not everyone wants to make open-source software.
Then write your own code, don't borrow others'. Seems simple enough. If you don't believe in the GPL, don't use code that goes by it.
...you're playing Quake, and your roommate turns on the TV...
It's all well and good to say that you won't notice latency in your TV signal because it's coming in on a controlled network, but do you want your TV eating up your bandwidth?
They're already doing this in Canada as well.
Seriously... There are a lot of small development companies out there, especially those building ASP/Netapps, who don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to lay out on Sparc boxes for their QA and development work.
I wonder what these are going to do to the countless leasing companies that are reaming small shops for a good $14-16k (low-end) Ultra2 boxes...
...it was pretty much asked right here on /. like 2 days ago, if not yesterday.
The Bush family has always been tied very tightly to the CIA... One of the foremost priorities of the next administration is "National Security"...
Our privacy rights are going to erode so fast that it really can't be called "erosion," it'll be more like "excise."
How old were you when you read it?
I finally read it for the first time last year after meaning to for a long time, and I can kind of agree with you on the quality of it, but if I'd read it at like 14 or 15 I think I'd be one of the rabid fans as well.
I think it's a worthwhile skill to still be able to read like a child. I'm just now (at 29) reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time, and it's far more enjoyable (although of course not necessary, I'm not comparing OSC and JRRT) if I read it from my 12-year-old mindset. I would have missed a lot of what I'm picking up now, so I'm not implying that it's a children's book either, but there's just something about a youthful imagination that enhances the experience of SF/Fantasy.
That said, I did enjoy Ender's Game, mainly because I read it from that point of view. It's a bit like reading SE Hinton as an adult -- it's still a good story, but the writing isn't as mature as an adult would hope for.
How old was OSC when he wrote Ender's Game?
Well, the problems aren't even just "all at once," since that implies that they are brief.
Around Chernobyl, things are still so far out of whack that they may not recover. We still don't know what the overall effects will be, and new things are still popping up with regularity.
If you'd like more information about it all, here's a good link to follow.
So it isn't just a bad accident, it is a monstrous box of unknowns that can ruin unknown generations of humanity as a result of human mistakes.
. In our zeal to keep America free of radioactivity,
really, damn frivolous people, wanting to avoid radiation... and toxic waste...
your look at this is way oversimplified -- your only mention of safety issues is during construction, it doesn't take into account any sort of accidents, any sort of long-term effects on the surrounding area, or the people that live in it.
there is far more at stake here than financial issues.
God knows I don't. Microsoft has proven time and again that their only driving force is their own survival.
Interesting, how we have the right to vote, but no control over the voting system.
...I currently hold the patent on using text and images in a series of panels to amuse the viewer on the web.
I will be expecting royalty checks to start pouring in. Gabe, Iliad, I'd like to point out that if I do not find a particular comic amusing, I have reserved the right to pull it.
Hint: I find the word "flan" infinitely amusing. Please plan accordingly.
uh, I use usenet on a daily basis, and have for 6 years now. it's not dead. there are just as many tight, solid communities out there now as there ever were, if not more.
i just don't get the whole "usenet is dead" argument.
"drop to a bash" just sounds.... incomplete.
:]
maybe you shouldn't have skipped today's lithium
and often i do say ATM machine. and pin number.
I don't however, say "with au jus sauce" because nothing comes with with juice sauce.
I don't believe Apple will keep everything "under the hood". I do believe they will have a graphical front end for pratically everything, but if you want to pop into a command line and configure things with preciseness, I doubt that will be removed.
I get claustrophobic on Macs. It's my main issue with them: "How do I get at my config files?" "Wait, there's no SHELL? NO SHELL?"
Just the thought of having a nice looking box with a sweet, polished, stable GUI (in which I can actually *gasp* copy and paste between different apps and still be able to drop to a bash shell....
You can have Apache and procmail and Photoshop.
That sentence alone strikes straight at the heart of this matter.
You've got BSD, and I've got shiny happy app support.
And, of course, a nice looking box to keep it all in.
This is the bane of Apple right now. They've got comparable processors (speed-wise), but the MHz numbers don't look good at all. Motorola needs to trade instructions per clock cylce for higher MHz ratings to make them sound better (faster) to the lay-public.
I think Apple was doing a good job of this at first, but they seem to have stopped pushing the speed issue.
All they really need to do is get a coupl eof sentences into each ad that mentions the actual speed improvements, and make a mocking shot at the clock-speed race (there's nothing that Apple customers like more than mocking jabs at PC machines/people), and their job would be done.
Again, they're really just looking at problems with marketing issues... Nothing new to Apple.
As a final note, I think it's pretty sad that you do not wish to think about your home computer. To expect everything to work and not know what your computer does and why it does it is just ignorance, and no one should desire that.
/. they are, but outside, the people you meet in the Big Blue Room don't want to have to think about it.
Like the original poster, I work in a unix environment most of the time, and I work in w2k the rest of the time. Lately I've been working 6 days a week, 12-14 hour days.
At this point, my machine at home is used for nothing but occasional surfing and email. It's an appliance, a communications device.
I shouldn't have to think about it. Once I've installed the OS and added DNS, and IP address and a gateway, I shouldn't have to think any further.
Most of the population isn't interested in hacking. Maybe on IRC and on
I'm looking for a simple appliance to put into the kitchen which will handle email and looking up recipes and occasionally checking web pages. I'd like to plug it in, just like the toaster, to an electrical outlet, then plug in the ethernet cable, maybe set the IP settings, and be done. Plain and simple.
This is not sad. This is reality.
It seems that in the name of stopping copyright infringement in the way of piracy, we have lost our right to make archival copies of whatever media we purchase.
This right never seems to be mentioned in the debates that I've seen, and yet it is something that is extremely important to the individual, especially when you are looking at software packages beomcing more and more expensive every year. If we've paid several thousand dollars for an Enterprise package like, say, Visual InterDev, having an archival copy of it is extremely important.
It doesn't appear as though the schemes for hard drive copy protection have any such concerns, much like all of the current pushes to reform copyright law.
We're living in an age when individual rights are being thrown over left and right in the name of profit margins, and it's projects like this that are eroding them.
...will they be able to turn lead into gold? :]
Or even be able to find gold deposits underground with a simple handheld device? Maybe something wireless, for the handspring, and open source...
I apologize, but I guess to each of us it sounds like the other is spewing a party line. I also say this because noone has yet even considered the fact that this entirely untested crop isn't being used to improve the health of the countries it has been dicovered in, it's being tested on third-world nations.
Malnutrition is a problem in most countries. Beta Karotene would be good in the diets of most of us, yet for some reason we're not seeing it on the shelves.
Like my earlier ignored analogy to drug testing in poor urban areas, this point bothers me. Apparently it doesn't bother you. I'm stil allowed to voice this opinion.
I'm not especially happy with the radiating of beef or other seeds either.
my email address is there, I just don't make it an easy link for crawlers.
Man there are a lotta shills about recently.
I'm not claiming evil on everything. I'm just stating that there is no evidence showing what will happen with long-term consumption of GM foods.
It's being tested on the populations of third-world nations. Kinda like how drug testing tends to take place in poor urban neighborhoods.
We cannot just order these countries to stop producing white rice in favor of brown rice.
...but somehow we can order them to start growing "Golden Rice"?
I took ritalin for the last 4 years of my 9 year stint at college.
It was the only way I was going to pay attention long enough to the drivel that I was forced to sit through -- yes, some of it was fun, but for the most part it was just painful. I have trouble respecting and therefore paying attention to things that try to make me conform.
At any rate, I've since graduated and have been free of all stimulants (even caffeine) for quite some time now, with no problems whatsoever.
It was a necessary evil to get me a degree. Which, when all is said and done, I am honestly glad I got. But I don't need it anymore, and am much happier without it.